An important aspect of time-based auctions is knowing exactly when the auction is going to end. Specifically, with on-line auctions, whether a bidder wins the item or not can be decided in a matter of seconds. As such, presently a variety of countdown clocks exist to help notify a bidder of the closing time of an auction.
Nonetheless, such countdown clocks have a variety of shortcomings. For example, some countdown clocks run on the bidding site web browser, without any live synchronization mechanism with the auction server. Therefore, once a page is loaded and the countdown clock starts to run on a web browser, any changes to the auction end time are not reflected unless the browser page is refreshed. This could result inaccurate information presented to the bidder, such as the auction is about to end, when in fact that may not be the case. In addition, different bidders could see different auction end times, depending on when they last accessed the page.
Another drawback of current countdown clocks is that they are often one-dimensional, such that the clocks only count down based on the auction site's clock time and refresh at a set rate. These clocks do not allow auctioneers and/or bidders to customize options related to how the clock counts down and/or is refreshed. Accordingly, the present invention resolves these and other problems with current implementations.